7 ms·

Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence

122 points by Petiver 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Analemma_ 10y ago
The whole "better angels of our nature" optimism thing kind of seems like sticking your head in the sand to me. Of course we should have a sense of perspective about how bad things are currently (which seems to be what Pinker is saying), but we should also carefully note whether we currently appear to be on an upward or downward trajectory (IMO, downward), and more importantly, whether there are any forces or incentives on the horizon that might reverse the trend (IMO, no). Better futures have to be consciously fought for. We can't really rely anymore on the "End of History" theory that the arrow of time inevitably points toward peaceful liberal democracy. Even Fukuyama was iffy about that as he admitted in a WSJ interview in 2014, and things have only gotten dicier since. My current pessimism about the future is not a function of how bad things currently are-- it has definitely been much worse-- but that all the incentives are aligned toward making it worse and I don't see many people or forces aligned toward making it better. Pinker ignores that to his detriment.
- philippoi 10y ago
  I haven't read "Better Angels" yet or gone through this interview, but if he actually ignores the forces that are aligned toward making the global situation worse, that would surprise me. I have read "How the Mind Works" and "The Blank Slate" and neither lacks that nuance, especially the latter title. He continually refers to the political struggle at the core of the Nature/Nurture debate and its practical implications for everyday life. Given the nature of his thinking and the thickness of Better Angels, I'd be surprised if he doesn't acknowledge the possibility of malign forces. His motivation for writing the book, I thought, was to encourage people to participate in the struggle against that malignant current (even if it's the minority vector in his view) and engage in the opposite direction of having a positive impact on global society through the continued pursuit of Enlightenment. Edit: for clarity.
  - wamsachel 10y ago
    You're correct in looking at the thickness of the book and being wary of what's coming out in the media. In the book, the trends and statistics were just a section (albeit a big one) but the rest of the book discusses a lot of theory as to what is driving the downward trend. Ed Herman wrote a critique of the book, which I think is fair. For instance, Pinker chose to use Vietnam casualty stats from a source that a lot of intellectuals dismiss as painting a forgiving picture of the situation. Regardless, I think the book gives a lot of great history lessons, statistical explanations, game theory discussion, talk on Hobbes and the Leviathan, political correctness as a social driver, the effects that education, technology, communication have, and so on. Unfortunately, when it comes to current event interpretations, I think overall Pinker is out of his wheel house (compared to, say, Chomsky or Ed Herman), and he should be concerned that the media, which is sympathetic to corpoarte and State interests, are eager to solicit his opinions on the present day geo-politic picture
    - philippoi 10y ago
      "Unfortunately, when it comes to current event interpretations, I think overall Pinker is out of his wheel house (compared to, say, Chomsky or Ed Herman), and he should be concerned that the media, which is sympathetic to corpoarte and State interests, are eager to solicit his opinions on the present day geo-politic picture" Really good point I had been fuzzily trying to seize but hadn't been able to pin down without your perspective. I was compelled to highlight that portion of your post in particular.
- onion2k 10y ago
  we should also carefully note whether we currently appear to be on an upward or downward trajectory (IMO, downward) There's no interpretative reasoning required when you're looking at a graph of the level of violence in society - it can be, and is, something that we can measure. You don't need an opinion about it. There's nothing subjective to think about and decide on. It's based on information. As such, your opinion is objectively wrong. There is a wealth of evidence about how bad things have been over the past 200 years or so, and every metric shows that things are getting better. The only way to make the numbers look like things are getting worse is to cherry pick a short window - for example, you can show violent crime rose in the first decade of the 21st century, but it fell for the previous 5 decades to that, so things are still better now.
  - Analemma_ 10y ago
    > It's based on information. As such, your opinion is objectively wrong. Hang on, I'm not making the claim you think I'm making. Pinker observes that the level of violence in society is at an all-time low- that is, as you say, an objective fact beyond dispute (modulo measurement error). But there is a clear implied claim there that this fact means pessimism for the future is unwarranted. That is what I am disputing, because I think trends and incentives are more important than current numbers (think about how a company's share price can fall even if they have a great quarter, if investors don't think its future prospects are great) I also dispute your claim that _every_ metric shows things are getting better. Some are, especially in areas like health and lifespan, but others (income inequality, social cohesion, faith in democracy, etc.) are not. There are legitimate grounds for disagreement as to which metrics are more important to the question of "should we be optimistic or pessimistic about the future", and maybe your opinion differs from mine, but that does not make me objectively wrong.
    - onion2k 10y ago
      We'll always be able to say "But what if things get worse again?!" just as we'll always be able to say "What if things carry on getting better?". Any answer to the question is useless. We should guard against doing things to make the world worse, obviously, but I don't see much value in pessimism, especially if it requires ignoring a long term trend. That said, speculation about the future beyond a few years away is largely pointless anyway. We get things wrong far more that we get things right, and when we are right it's mostly because we were either lucky, we've only looked at the predictions we want to look at and ignored the wrong ones, or we were so vague we couldn't have been wrong. Predicting the future is hard.
- amasad 10y ago
  Not sure if you read the book but it's far from a happy-go-lucky-optimism, if anything Pinker is as cynical about human nature as Thomas Hobbs. Heck, you can even call this book the Leviathan 2. With that being said I think he does a good job providing a lot of nuance, data, and qualitative arguments. And tbqh, it's convincing.
- amasad 10y ago
  Not sure if you read the book but it's far from a happy-go-lucky-optimism, if anything Pinker is as cynical about human nature as Thomas Hobbs. Heck, you can even call this book the Leviathan 2. With that being said I think he does a good job providing a lot of nuance, data, and qualitative arguments. And tbqh, it's convincing.
- stcredzero 10y ago
  The whole "better angels of our nature" optimism thing kind of seems like sticking your head in the sand to me. Any state that wants to stick around had better be good at defending itself and its interests. If you're so "enlightened" that you've forgotten how to resolve conflicts in a non-ritualized/systematized way, then someone is going to come along and We can't really rely anymore on the "End of History" theory that the arrow of time inevitably points toward peaceful liberal democracy Was that ever a theory, or was it really just something that people wanted to believe because it sounds hopeful and nice? For most people, it's the latter. It actually has an economic basis to it, however. The more you distribute wealth and power, the wider a constituency must be protected by the current regime. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs it has definitely been much worse-- but that all the incentives are aligned toward making it worse Exactly how much worse? There's nothing fundamentally wrong with a local maxima, so long as the overall trend is up. The backslide can't be too excessive without destabilization, however. (We're seeing that!)
  - Analemma_ 10y ago
    I'm reading your comment and having trouble figuring out exactly where we disagree. > Any state that wants to stick around had better be good at defending itself and its interests. I agree? I'm not sure where in my comment you got the opposite impression, nor why it seems relevant to my argument. > Was that ever a theory, or was it really just something that people wanted to believe because it sounds hopeful and nice? "The End of History and the Last Man" was hugely influential in political science circles in the 90's and early 2000's, on both the left and the right. People definitely bought its premise of the inevitability of liberal democracy as eventually taking over the world through market forces and social movements alone. I would argue it even had a cultural impact outside academia and policy wonks. Even now, when people say they're not worried about current problems because "it'll work itself out somehow", they are implicitly citing Fukuyama even if they don't realize it. > The backslide can't be too excessive without destabilization, however. (We're seeing that!) Which is why I'm talking about forces and incentives. I wouldn't be so worried if I could see anything on the horizon that might push things back upward. But the trends that alarm me (breakdown in social trust, loss of trust in democracy) are mostly positive feedback loops that only get stronger with time.
- haberman 10y ago
  > The whole "better angels of our nature" optimism thing kind of seems like sticking your head in the sand to me. I think it's a necessary counterbalance to a 24 hour news cycle that brings the most violent and strife-filled events into constant focus. It is easy to get the impression that the world is worse than its ever been. That's why it's important to take a step back and see a different perspective that accurately reflects how the world today compares to the past -- a past which we as humans are biased towards romanticizing anyway. > My current pessimism about the future is not a function of how bad things currently are-- it has definitely been much worse-- but that all the incentives are aligned toward making it worse and I don't see many people or forces aligned toward making it better. That is one perspective that may or may not manifest into measurable "worseness" in the future. Some people have a different perspective, and could point to things like: https://givingpledge.org/ https://givingpledge.org/
pierre_d528 10y ago
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violence.pdf http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violence.pdf Pinker does not know how to count. What is this doing here?
- whitepoplar 10y ago
  I agree. NNT makes a surprisingly cogent argument for why Pinker is incorrect. In NNT's words: "Charlatan!".
- cossatot 10y ago
  I don't think that this paper is the nail in the coffin that NNT or his groupies present it as. There are a lot of arbitrary transformations in the data that, while acceptable and in many cases enlightening, are by no means the only way of analyzing it. For example, having a bounded function between the population min and max and then a dual function that goes to infinity may help, but it's not immediatly obvious why. I find the rescaling of the data to be a fraction of the population (as Pinker did) to be more natural than their functional normalization, in spite of their objections. I also think that analyzing data in a cumulative fashion, rather than simply as events that occurred in a point in time (with uncertainty) is far more appropriate in the ease of simultaneously handling both short-duration events (WWII, US Civil War) and protracted violent conflicts (i.e. Mongol invasion, Hundred Years War). Then, breaks in slope in the cumulative w/ time function can be much more easily discerned. (Also do this with your budgeting/accounting instead of your monthly expenditures or whatever to see if your spending habits are changing). But again, looking at the cumulative function is great for getting a running tally through time but has problems with normalization. The point here is not necessarily that they did anything wrong, but that it's an ambiguous situation with lots of what Andrew Gelman refers to as 'researcher degrees of freedom'[1], and it's necessary to read all of it critically, and realize what researchers are doing and why. edit: [1]: http://andrewgelman.com/2012/11/01/researcher-degrees-of-freedom/ http://andrewgelman.com/2012/11/01/researcher-degrees-of-fre...
  - pierre_d528 10y ago
    Mr. cossatot, Would you flesh out your ideas and submit them to Mr. Taleb? You proving Mr. Taleb wrong would be quite an achievement and probably an instructive one. If you cannot, please keep unjustified opinions to yourself.
oli5679 10y ago
The entire conversations with Tyler series is great. He makes an effort to ask slightly unconventional questions and doesn't show off. Previous guests include Erza Klein, Peter Thiel, Jonathan Haidt and Nate Silver. https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/all https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/all
6stringmerc 10y ago
Oof, reading through the discussion on English linguistics brought back some pleasant but loud arguments I had with an Editor pal[1]. She was fantastic at grammar, of structural accuracy, and enjoyed that nature of language. On the other hand, I look at words and conventions and prefer the "let's see how horribly we can break and re-assemble these things and have fun communicating" school of grammar-as-fluid. I think it genuinely helped each of us appreciate the merits and contributions of both attitudes toward English and writing. [1] Disclosure: She's recently become my screenwriting editor on retainer
RodericDay 10y ago
Steven Pinker always reminds me of that Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!". His entire career as a public intellectual seems to be as a defender of the status quo, reassuring tech-inclined liberals that everything is fine, that they can go on consuming, because "the system" is working well. And he writes gigantic tomes that require gigantic tomes to reply to, so it's a bit of a war of attrition.
backtoyoujim 10y ago
"One of the reasons that often lyricists and poets and novelists will prefer the irregular to the regular when there’s a choice — strided versus strode, strove versus strived, hove versus heaved — " #LiberalArtsMatter
skiplist1 10y ago
The problem with people that believe that being reasonable is the reasonable thing to do is that many crucial moments of our lives depends on taking irrational moves. I remember someone saying that the way to win in a game in which both of you are chained together at the edge of a mountain and the first one to take rational moves lose is to dance while singing at the edge of the mountain. Like in poker we need some irrational moves to win in society. Also, America was discovered because someone make a trip to nowhere.

122 points by Petiver 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

The whole "better angels of our nature" optimism thing kind of seems like sticking your head in the sand to me. Of course we should have a sense of perspective about how bad things are currently (which seems to be what Pinker is saying), but we should also carefully note whether we currently appear to be on an upward or downward trajectory (IMO, downward), and more importantly, whether there are any forces or incentives on the horizon that might reverse the trend (IMO, no). Better futures have to be consciously fought for. We can't really rely anymore on the "End of History" theory that the arrow of time inevitably points toward peaceful liberal democracy. Even Fukuyama was iffy about that as he admitted in a WSJ interview in 2014, and things have only gotten dicier since. My current pessimism about the future is not a function of how bad things currently are-- it has definitely been much worse-- but that all the incentives are aligned toward making it worse and I don't see many people or forces aligned toward making it better. Pinker ignores that to his detriment.

philippoi 10y ago
I haven't read "Better Angels" yet or gone through this interview, but if he actually ignores the forces that are aligned toward making the global situation worse, that would surprise me. I have read "How the Mind Works" and "The Blank Slate" and neither lacks that nuance, especially the latter title. He continually refers to the political struggle at the core of the Nature/Nurture debate and its practical implications for everyday life. Given the nature of his thinking and the thickness of Better Angels, I'd be surprised if he doesn't acknowledge the possibility of malign forces. His motivation for writing the book, I thought, was to encourage people to participate in the struggle against that malignant current (even if it's the minority vector in his view) and engage in the opposite direction of having a positive impact on global society through the continued pursuit of Enlightenment. Edit: for clarity.
- wamsachel 10y ago
  You're correct in looking at the thickness of the book and being wary of what's coming out in the media. In the book, the trends and statistics were just a section (albeit a big one) but the rest of the book discusses a lot of theory as to what is driving the downward trend. Ed Herman wrote a critique of the book, which I think is fair. For instance, Pinker chose to use Vietnam casualty stats from a source that a lot of intellectuals dismiss as painting a forgiving picture of the situation. Regardless, I think the book gives a lot of great history lessons, statistical explanations, game theory discussion, talk on Hobbes and the Leviathan, political correctness as a social driver, the effects that education, technology, communication have, and so on. Unfortunately, when it comes to current event interpretations, I think overall Pinker is out of his wheel house (compared to, say, Chomsky or Ed Herman), and he should be concerned that the media, which is sympathetic to corpoarte and State interests, are eager to solicit his opinions on the present day geo-politic picture
  - philippoi 10y ago
    "Unfortunately, when it comes to current event interpretations, I think overall Pinker is out of his wheel house (compared to, say, Chomsky or Ed Herman), and he should be concerned that the media, which is sympathetic to corpoarte and State interests, are eager to solicit his opinions on the present day geo-politic picture" Really good point I had been fuzzily trying to seize but hadn't been able to pin down without your perspective. I was compelled to highlight that portion of your post in particular.
onion2k 10y ago
we should also carefully note whether we currently appear to be on an upward or downward trajectory (IMO, downward) There's no interpretative reasoning required when you're looking at a graph of the level of violence in society - it can be, and is, something that we can measure. You don't need an opinion about it. There's nothing subjective to think about and decide on. It's based on information. As such, your opinion is objectively wrong. There is a wealth of evidence about how bad things have been over the past 200 years or so, and every metric shows that things are getting better. The only way to make the numbers look like things are getting worse is to cherry pick a short window - for example, you can show violent crime rose in the first decade of the 21st century, but it fell for the previous 5 decades to that, so things are still better now.
- Analemma_ 10y ago
  > It's based on information. As such, your opinion is objectively wrong. Hang on, I'm not making the claim you think I'm making. Pinker observes that the level of violence in society is at an all-time low- that is, as you say, an objective fact beyond dispute (modulo measurement error). But there is a clear implied claim there that this fact means pessimism for the future is unwarranted. That is what I am disputing, because I think trends and incentives are more important than current numbers (think about how a company's share price can fall even if they have a great quarter, if investors don't think its future prospects are great) I also dispute your claim that _every_ metric shows things are getting better. Some are, especially in areas like health and lifespan, but others (income inequality, social cohesion, faith in democracy, etc.) are not. There are legitimate grounds for disagreement as to which metrics are more important to the question of "should we be optimistic or pessimistic about the future", and maybe your opinion differs from mine, but that does not make me objectively wrong.
  - onion2k 10y ago
    We'll always be able to say "But what if things get worse again?!" just as we'll always be able to say "What if things carry on getting better?". Any answer to the question is useless. We should guard against doing things to make the world worse, obviously, but I don't see much value in pessimism, especially if it requires ignoring a long term trend. That said, speculation about the future beyond a few years away is largely pointless anyway. We get things wrong far more that we get things right, and when we are right it's mostly because we were either lucky, we've only looked at the predictions we want to look at and ignored the wrong ones, or we were so vague we couldn't have been wrong. Predicting the future is hard.
amasad 10y ago
Not sure if you read the book but it's far from a happy-go-lucky-optimism, if anything Pinker is as cynical about human nature as Thomas Hobbs. Heck, you can even call this book the Leviathan 2. With that being said I think he does a good job providing a lot of nuance, data, and qualitative arguments. And tbqh, it's convincing.
amasad 10y ago
Not sure if you read the book but it's far from a happy-go-lucky-optimism, if anything Pinker is as cynical about human nature as Thomas Hobbs. Heck, you can even call this book the Leviathan 2. With that being said I think he does a good job providing a lot of nuance, data, and qualitative arguments. And tbqh, it's convincing.
stcredzero 10y ago
The whole "better angels of our nature" optimism thing kind of seems like sticking your head in the sand to me. Any state that wants to stick around had better be good at defending itself and its interests. If you're so "enlightened" that you've forgotten how to resolve conflicts in a non-ritualized/systematized way, then someone is going to come along and We can't really rely anymore on the "End of History" theory that the arrow of time inevitably points toward peaceful liberal democracy Was that ever a theory, or was it really just something that people wanted to believe because it sounds hopeful and nice? For most people, it's the latter. It actually has an economic basis to it, however. The more you distribute wealth and power, the wider a constituency must be protected by the current regime. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs it has definitely been much worse-- but that all the incentives are aligned toward making it worse Exactly how much worse? There's nothing fundamentally wrong with a local maxima, so long as the overall trend is up. The backslide can't be too excessive without destabilization, however. (We're seeing that!)
- Analemma_ 10y ago
  I'm reading your comment and having trouble figuring out exactly where we disagree. > Any state that wants to stick around had better be good at defending itself and its interests. I agree? I'm not sure where in my comment you got the opposite impression, nor why it seems relevant to my argument. > Was that ever a theory, or was it really just something that people wanted to believe because it sounds hopeful and nice? "The End of History and the Last Man" was hugely influential in political science circles in the 90's and early 2000's, on both the left and the right. People definitely bought its premise of the inevitability of liberal democracy as eventually taking over the world through market forces and social movements alone. I would argue it even had a cultural impact outside academia and policy wonks. Even now, when people say they're not worried about current problems because "it'll work itself out somehow", they are implicitly citing Fukuyama even if they don't realize it. > The backslide can't be too excessive without destabilization, however. (We're seeing that!) Which is why I'm talking about forces and incentives. I wouldn't be so worried if I could see anything on the horizon that might push things back upward. But the trends that alarm me (breakdown in social trust, loss of trust in democracy) are mostly positive feedback loops that only get stronger with time.
haberman 10y ago
> The whole "better angels of our nature" optimism thing kind of seems like sticking your head in the sand to me. I think it's a necessary counterbalance to a 24 hour news cycle that brings the most violent and strife-filled events into constant focus. It is easy to get the impression that the world is worse than its ever been. That's why it's important to take a step back and see a different perspective that accurately reflects how the world today compares to the past -- a past which we as humans are biased towards romanticizing anyway. > My current pessimism about the future is not a function of how bad things currently are-- it has definitely been much worse-- but that all the incentives are aligned toward making it worse and I don't see many people or forces aligned toward making it better. That is one perspective that may or may not manifest into measurable "worseness" in the future. Some people have a different perspective, and could point to things like: https://givingpledge.org/ https://givingpledge.org/

pierre_d528 10y ago

http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violence.pdf http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violence.pdf Pinker does not know how to count. What is this doing here?

whitepoplar 10y ago
I agree. NNT makes a surprisingly cogent argument for why Pinker is incorrect. In NNT's words: "Charlatan!".
cossatot 10y ago
I don't think that this paper is the nail in the coffin that NNT or his groupies present it as. There are a lot of arbitrary transformations in the data that, while acceptable and in many cases enlightening, are by no means the only way of analyzing it. For example, having a bounded function between the population min and max and then a dual function that goes to infinity may help, but it's not immediatly obvious why. I find the rescaling of the data to be a fraction of the population (as Pinker did) to be more natural than their functional normalization, in spite of their objections. I also think that analyzing data in a cumulative fashion, rather than simply as events that occurred in a point in time (with uncertainty) is far more appropriate in the ease of simultaneously handling both short-duration events (WWII, US Civil War) and protracted violent conflicts (i.e. Mongol invasion, Hundred Years War). Then, breaks in slope in the cumulative w/ time function can be much more easily discerned. (Also do this with your budgeting/accounting instead of your monthly expenditures or whatever to see if your spending habits are changing). But again, looking at the cumulative function is great for getting a running tally through time but has problems with normalization. The point here is not necessarily that they did anything wrong, but that it's an ambiguous situation with lots of what Andrew Gelman refers to as 'researcher degrees of freedom'[1], and it's necessary to read all of it critically, and realize what researchers are doing and why. edit: [1]: http://andrewgelman.com/2012/11/01/researcher-degrees-of-freedom/ http://andrewgelman.com/2012/11/01/researcher-degrees-of-fre...
- pierre_d528 10y ago
  Mr. cossatot, Would you flesh out your ideas and submit them to Mr. Taleb? You proving Mr. Taleb wrong would be quite an achievement and probably an instructive one. If you cannot, please keep unjustified opinions to yourself.

oli5679 10y ago

The entire conversations with Tyler series is great. He makes an effort to ask slightly unconventional questions and doesn't show off. Previous guests include Erza Klein, Peter Thiel, Jonathan Haidt and Nate Silver. https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/all https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/all

6stringmerc 10y ago

Oof, reading through the discussion on English linguistics brought back some pleasant but loud arguments I had with an Editor pal[1]. She was fantastic at grammar, of structural accuracy, and enjoyed that nature of language. On the other hand, I look at words and conventions and prefer the "let's see how horribly we can break and re-assemble these things and have fun communicating" school of grammar-as-fluid. I think it genuinely helped each of us appreciate the merits and contributions of both attitudes toward English and writing. [1] Disclosure: She's recently become my screenwriting editor on retainer

RodericDay 10y ago

Steven Pinker always reminds me of that Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!". His entire career as a public intellectual seems to be as a defender of the status quo, reassuring tech-inclined liberals that everything is fine, that they can go on consuming, because "the system" is working well. And he writes gigantic tomes that require gigantic tomes to reply to, so it's a bit of a war of attrition.

backtoyoujim 10y ago

"One of the reasons that often lyricists and poets and novelists will prefer the irregular to the regular when there’s a choice — strided versus strode, strove versus strived, hove versus heaved — " #LiberalArtsMatter

skiplist1 10y ago

The problem with people that believe that being reasonable is the reasonable thing to do is that many crucial moments of our lives depends on taking irrational moves. I remember someone saying that the way to win in a game in which both of you are chained together at the edge of a mountain and the first one to take rational moves lose is to dance while singing at the edge of the mountain. Like in poker we need some irrational moves to win in society. Also, America was discovered because someone make a trip to nowhere.